Johnson: Flames’ disastrous performance betrays fan loyalty

Miikka Kiprusoff #34 of the Calgary Flames watches the replay board after giving up his fifth goal of the game against the Columbus Blue Jackets on March 22, 2013 at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus defeated Calgary 5-1.

Hope is ebbing. Unrest growing. Blame moving out and spreading swiftly, like ripples in a still pond.

It’s all so numbingly, distressingly familiar.

With a fourth consecutive springtime of playoff-less hockey in the offing, will the Calgary Flames actually institute meaningful change or continue the familiar pattern of caution that has characterized this organizational philosophy?

Be warned: The usual, hollow post-failure vow to savagely, thoroughly critique the entire setup, top to bottom, and make the necessary alterations won’t cut it anymore. The rot has gone on too long.

They are, if you can bear to look, closer to 30th overall than eighth in the Western Conference.

That noted:

*This team, as constructed, simply ain’t good enough. Not exactly a breathless Wolf Blitzer CNN We-Interrupt-Your-Regularly-Scheduled-Programming bulletin, granted, but there you are. For quite a while, incoming GM Jay Feaster had Darryl Sutter’s managerial ‘legacy’ as handy insulation to explain away the losing and while some of the pieces of that failed regime remain, the grace period’s over.

More and more, this is the product of Jay Feaster’s imagination. And the results speak for themselves.

*The new skipper, the uber-enthusiastic Bob Hartley, has not been able to change nosediving fortunes. They’re just bad in a different way. He arrived selling a new, pressurizing, uptempo style but someone keeps forgetting to lock the front door of the house when they all head off on vacation. Despite the oldest demographic in the league, they’re in absolute shambles defensively and that comes down to coaching as well as personnel. No, the abbreviated training camp and condensed season certainly hasn’t worked in any new coach’s favour but there’s a lot of dull, flat sameness here out West, and why these Flames with such an experienced cast should finish outside the playoff sphere, and, say, the San Jose Sharks, Dallas Stars or Nashville Predators possibly sneak in, is a real puzzler.

Why, we’re starting to gaze back on those Brent Sutter-piloted years of eight, 12 and eight games over .500 with something resembling warm, wistful nostalgia.

*Jarome Iginla looks like a guy in desperate needs of a location change, irrespective of his wishes. Yes, it’s a wonderfully romantic notion that he remain in our town for life, but that isn’t practical nor, ultimately, in his best professional interests.

Rumours out of one of the oft-mentioned destinations have the Flames asking for a top-four defence prospect, a draft pick AND a player off the active roster to pry away the 35-year-old local icon, leading you to believe, if true, that they A) are delusional; B) have stepped into a Marty McFly DeLorean, and, as Huey Lewis once warbled, figure they’ve gone back in time, to, say, 2006; C) are audaciously casting out early nibbles to see if anyone might be mad enough to bite on an wildly extravagant sales tag, fully prepared to drop demands as we close in on April 3rd; or D) are making nothing more than a cosmetic attempt to shop Iginla (see, we tried!), and not, in fact, actually serious about consummating a deal.

As has been pointed out, ad nauseam, going to a contender would hopefully reignite Iginla’s competitive drive — he appears, frankly, stale, and who wouldn’t, after coming-up-to four years without a single playoff game to stir the competitive juices?- while allowing the organization to make a clean break, plot a new course, begin afresh. So great has been the man’s influence around here through 16 seasons that his shadow, for good and for bad, continues to hang over the whole enterprise.

*Bullet-riddled goaltender Miikka Kiprusoff, meanwhile, looks like a guy who’d desperately welcome a change. So magnificent for so long outfitted in Flame silks, who in possession of their faculties could deny the flexible Finn an opportunity to backstop a contending franchise, not one that only talks big, instead of playing out the final year of his Calgary contract utterly wasted in a thankless role?

*The upper, upper management, from president Ken King on down does the hiring and firing and signing off on the contracts and free agents that haven’t worked well enough to recoup the minimum return, which would be eighth place. For that, they too must be held culpable. The buck, and the puck, after all, stops with them.

Yes, the building’s still jammed (well, mostly) but, how-dee!, this is Calgary, remember. Selling hockey to Calgarians is like selling Catholicism to nuns or penne rigate to Italians. You don’t exactly have to trot out the hard sell. The fact that the organization is still at the trough feeding off the glories of 2004 only goes to show how passionately people do care.

But loyalty of this intensity, betrayed for this long, has a habit of turning around and biting you savagely in the fleshy part of the buttocks.

As long as oil prices are high and the corporate dollars continue to flow, the pews will probably remain mostly full. But that in itself doesn’t begin to reflect a swelling citywide dissatisfaction with an ever-deteriorating product. To believe otherwise is conveniently avoiding the issue.

So limping back from another futile 0-3 road trip to face the St. Louis Blues on Sunday at the Scotiabank Saddledome, the Flames try once more attempt to regain lost ground.

Might they stage a stirring rebellion and make a concerted push toward the Western Conference equator, start shaving away points and leaping over other mediocrities in their path?

Miikka Kiprusoff #34 of the Calgary Flames watches the replay board after giving up his fifth goal of the game against the Columbus Blue Jackets on March 22, 2013 at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus defeated Calgary 5-1.

Photograph by: Kirk Irwin, Getty Images

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